Newbie ?? Diff between Pentium, Cleron and Athlon ?

[BugJunction]

We are buying my daughter a new computer and found a different one while shppping yesterday. It had 80 Gig of storage and was 1ghz (I think). It said it has the AMD Athlon processor, but neither my wife or I have heard of this. Can someone tell me the difference (pros and cons) between the Pentiums, Celeron and the Athlon?

Thanks,
David

 

[Dark4ng3l]

ok The athlon is the name for the 7th generation(k7) AMD(advanced miro devices) cpu(cental processing unit) There are 3 cores: k7(.25micron) k75(.18 micron, more cache dividers) and Thunderbird(256k l2 cache at full speed).
The p3 and celeron are both from the 6th generation(p6) architecture that debuted with the pentium pro. older p3's where katmai cores. All the newer p3's and celerons are coppermine(.18 micron, 256k l2 cache full speed 8way set asciciative) The celeron is basicaly a crippled p3(66mhz bus, 128 l2 cache, 4 way set asciciative)

The athlon is as fast as a p3 in most benchmarks and a bit faster in others. The main difference is price, the athlon is cheaper. Celerons are a joke(extremely slow).

 

[Dark4ng3l]

Oh yea and the AMD duron is the value cpu from amd is 5-10% slower than an athlon, it rapes the celeron in every benchmark.

 

[Goi]

I gather you're a newbie, so what Dark4ng3l said would presumably be over your head. Basically, a Pentium is a really old processor, even a Pentium 2 is pretty much obsolete. I assume you're talking about a Pentium 3. Pentium 3s are around the same performance clock for clock as an Athlon, i.e. a 1GHz P3 would perform around the same as a 1GHz Athlon. The Athlon is AMD's flagship processor, while the P3 is intel's ex-flagship processor(intel's current flagship is the P4). Despite the relatively similar performance, the Athlon processor costs significantly less, which makes it more desirable.

The Celeron is intel's budget/value line processor, while the Duron is AMD's counterpart. Same story applies about the pricing, but now, clock for clock, the Duron whips the Celeron's butt in performance. The Duron is about 10% slower than an similarly clocked P3/Athlon, but the Celeron is way slower. A 700MHz Celeron probably performs about the same as a 500MHz P3/Athlon in most applications.

 

[lagvoid]

Go with AMD!!! Athlon or duron doesnt matter

 

[Zedfu]

amd all the way, best bang for your bucks!!!

 

[Mustanggt]

Go with AMD Duron or Tbird then you might be able to upgrade down the road without it costing you a bundle of $ like the Intel pc would cost you.